


Frankincense, Myrrh, and Thatcher's Gold

by sawbones



Category: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (Video Games)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Christmas, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Past Domestic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 08:14:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19269283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sawbones/pseuds/sawbones
Summary: Christmas had never been Mike’s favourite holiday, even as a lad.





	Frankincense, Myrrh, and Thatcher's Gold

**Author's Note:**

> I know it's presently June, but this was my entry for the [dualrainbow](https://dualrainbow.tumblr.com/) Siegemas event! My prompt was: “You didn’t really think I’d let you spend Christmas alone, did you?”
> 
> Also I wrote this before The Hammer & The Scalpel came out so it's not very canon compliant wrt Thatcher's background.

Christmas had never been Mike’s favourite holiday, even as a lad. They weren’t the worst off family in Bideford but things got stretched thin between him and his siblings, and the docks froze up, and the arguing between his mum and dad always got worse at that time of year. He remembered his fifth, or maybe sixth Christmas when she’d had too much to drink and burnt their sad little turkey, and his dad had slapped her so hard he’d burst her lip. She’d ran out the house without even closing the door, snow drifting in the hallway, the embers guttering in the fireplace, and they’d all went to bed a little more cold and scared and hungry than usual. That feeling never really went away. **  
**

Things got better when they grew up, and his mum passed and they stopped seeing much of his dad until he was gone too. They tried to keep the family get-together going, the five of them, then David wrapped his car around a lamp-post when he was twenty-two, and Carol moved to Vancouver when she was twenty-eight, and they just kept drifting apart.

He was the only one who never got married, never had his own kids. There was space for him at the table, until there wasn’t. Annie’s husband never saw eye to eye with him, said he was a bad influence on the boys; he hadn’t had so much as a Christmas card from her since he ‘made a scene’ at her fortieth. John had a stroke when he was forty-four and his daughter put him in a home like he was some kind of vegetable, and he faded and faded until there was nothing left for Mike to visit.

So, his first Christmas alone probably wouldn’t be his last. He didn’t mind so much, really - technically he was on duty. Rainbow kept a skeleton crew at hand over the holidays, volunteers mostly, the ones who didn’t have anywhere else to be, or the ones who did and stayed anyway so the others could go home. He lived close enough to the base that Six let him away with not sleeping in the barracks, for which he was grateful. Too many people there seemed to hate the holidays even more than he did, and the whole bloody place was saturated in a tinsel-tinged gloom that he wanted to bodily avoid.

Liu had phoned him from Hong Kong in the morning, already tipsy and in a curiously morose mood. He’d spent half an hour on the line not saying much at all until Mike told him to fuck off and get something to eat already. He half-wished he’d gotten him a gift, even just a little minder, but he couldn’t think of the first thing that would just get laughed right into the bin.

He hadn’t heard anything from the boys yet, which stung a little more than he thought it would. Not surprising though, since they were all busy. Seamus had went back over the border to visit his parents in John O’Groats, and James was spending his first Christmas with the Chandars. They didn’t celebrate Christmas, obviously, but Mark had been deployed over Diwali so he took the week off anyway.

He’d half expected a call, a text maybe. His phone was accusingly silent, sitting on the worn sofa beside him. It was snowing outside, white static against the dark grey sky. The Queen’s Speech was on, but he’d muted it. Didn’t really feel like listening to a woman in a solid gold hat tell the country to keep a stiff upper lip and bear the coming hardships.

With a sigh, Mike hauled himself off the couch and padded through to the kitchen, his threadbare dressing gown flapping around him. He dropped his empty can in the recycling and picked a fresh one out the fridge, cracking it open and taking a swig; he leant against the counter littered with dirty dishes and thumbed the condensation off the shoulder of his can - Thatchers Gold, just like his old man used to drink. The irony wasn’t lost on him, and neither was the inherent sadness of drinking alone in his kitchen at three p.m. on Christmas Day. He wasn’t one to feel sorry for himself, but that was enough to twist a rueful smile out of him.

A knock at the door interrupted his second sip. He frowned but didn’t make a move to answer it: it’d be carollers, probably, or people collecting for the church. Maybe some poor sod late for lunch, turning up at the wrong house. Not anyone he needed or wanted to talk to anyway, so he ignored it as he shuffled back through to the living room. There was another knock as he passed through the hallway, louder this time.

“Baker, you sad bastard!” the amorphous shape through the frosted glass barked, “I can see you, you know. Open the door before I knock it down, it’s bloody freezing out here.”

Mike froze on the spot. He squinted at the door in some confusion, before he went to open it. He was met by a beaming, rosy-cheeked James Porter wearing a pair of felt reindeer antlers. Behind him was Mark with a frown of disapproval and an offensively festive Christmas jumper that definitely wasn’t his, and at the back of the three was Seamus, looking appropriately sheepish for a man carrying what appeared to be an entire fully-decorated Christmas tree over his shoulder.

A bauble fell off the tree and plink-plink-plink’d its way down the stairs behind them.

“Are you in your bleedin’ boxers?” James asked just as Mike was about to wonder out loud what the hell was going on, “Christ, we arrived just in time then. You mind?”

He shouldered past Mike into his flat, liberating the can from his slack fingers as he went. He disappeared into the kitchen with Mark trailing after him, muttering about too much sherry and ladened with bags that clinked and rustled. Seamus had the decency to try and shut the front door behind himself.

“Is there somewhere I could–?” he trailed off, gesturing to the bedraggled tree shedding tinsel like a ship bailing water. Mike wordlessly pointed at the living room, and Seamus disappeared into it. There was some rustling, the sound of more ornaments making a bid for freedom, some light swearing. A beat of silence, and a swell of airy choral music: he’d unmuted the telly for Songs of Praise, for whatever reason.

“Tesco was out of turkeys so we got a Chinese on the way instead, hope that’s alright,” James called through from the kitchen, pulling his attention back to them.

“I said we should try Marks & Spencers instead, or Waitrose,” Mark said tersely, rooting through cupboards for clean plates while James unpacked the food. Mike stood in the doorway, watching them make themselves quite at home.

“Waitrose,” James scoffed, “You got Waitrose money?”

Seamus appeared behind him, just in time to help nip the brewing argument in the bud. There was was a vaguely harried air about him that said he’d probably heard it already in the car over. “At least they let us have the display tree.”

“Well, they didn’t let us have it,” James paused to sip his pilfered can, “More like they were too scared to say no.”

He shared a knowing look with Seamus while Mark pretended he couldn’t hear them. The sure-to-be-fleeting silence was a window of opportunity Mike grabbed with both hands.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

All three of them looked at him like they only just remembered he was there.

“I don’t want to eat out of the container,” Mark said, holding his plates to his chest, “It’s greasy.”

“No I mean– what are you doing here. In my flat. I thought you were all supposed to be…” Mike waved his hand vaguely in a direction implying anywhere-but-here.

James played with the tab on his - Mike’s - can, “We can go, if you want. Honestly, your scabby dressing gown might be better company than Mark in one of his moods anyway.”

“I’m not in a mood,” Mark snapped, “I just–”

“I don’t want anyone to leave,” Mike said, holding his hand up to silence them both. He was amazed it still worked sometimes. Some Pavlovian response from the field. “Not before you’ve tidied up the mess you’ve already made anyway. I just meant I thought you were all, you know…busy today.”

It was hard to keep his voice neutral, to stop the relief, the cautious excitement from bleeding through. He couldn’t have them thinking he was going soft.

“Mum and Dad are away to Brisbane to see Mhairi and the kids this year, actually. Didn’t see the point in going all the way up north for an empty house,” Seamus said. He sounded like he was trying too hard to be casual. Always had been a terrible liar.

“We had to get out of the house before someone was throttled,” Mark said, “Mum hates James. The whole thing was a disaster, and we were only there a night.”

James looked inappropriately pleased with himself, “Your dad likes me. Your cousins like me.”

“Of course they like you - you gave them a taser,” Mark sighed, “You let them use it.”

“Yeah, on me! So what’s the problem?”

Somehow James getting kicked out of Mark’s house for letting his cousins (and father, presumably) taser him was more believable than Seamus pretending his parents were visiting his sister. A plate was pushed into his hands: chicken fried rice with curry sauce, two spring rolls on top so they didn’t get soggy. Just how he liked it. He swallowed around the sudden lump in his throat.

“So you thought you’d come here and bother me instead. What on earth for?”

There was a round of long suffering sighs, and even an eyeroll from Mark.

“Fuck sake, Baker, come off it.” James said. He had his own plate, and one for Mark who was getting them drinks - wine in a couple of chipped old mugs, since there were no wine glasses to be had. A few more cans had been freed from the fridge too. Seamus took one for himself, slipped the other in Mike’s dressing gown pocket.

“You didn’t really think we were going to let you spend Christmas alone, did you?” he said, slinging an arm around his shoulders in a way that didn’t really suit either of them. He got an elbow in the ribs for his trouble, but Mike couldn’t help the smile he’d been fighting to hide.

They shuffled through to the living room, Seamus, Mark and James crushed on to the two man couch with Mike in his favourite armchair. Mark, for all his earlier prickliness, was largely sitting on James’ lap with his legs flung over Seamus who seemed happy enough to use his shins as a makeshift table. They didn’t talk all that much as they ate and flicked through the nonsense on TV, but it was comfortable. It was warm. It was family.

“Die Hard’s on at five,” James said, his arms around Mark’s waist and his head on Seamus’s shoulder. “…Best Christmas movie for sure.”

Mark twisted in his grip to scowl at him, “Christmas movie? Oh now you’re definitely on the wind-up–”

It took about five seconds for the three of them to dissolve into another barely coherent argument on the couch. Mike smiled. Family indeed.


End file.
